Simulation of rigid body fracturing has been a hot research topic in computer graphics and applied sciences, such as collision detection and the simulation of explosions. Many methods have been proposed and applied to rigid body fracturing, including finite element methods, the fast multipole method (FMM), and boundary element methods.

In this paper, the authors study simulation of rigid body fracturing using surface meshes, which are based on the boundary element method. The paper has three main contributions. The first contribution is that the simulation requires surface meshes only. By using surface meshes, volumetric degrees of freedom are ignored and computational complexity is reduced. The disadvantage is that the proposed method cannot handle material failures that start in the interior. The second contribution is that a new “indirect boundary integral formulation for the linear quasi-static elasticity problem” is designed. FMM is applied to solve the proposed formulation, and a simplified kernel-independent FMM method is introduced. The final contribution is that an explicit mesh-based surface-tracking algorithm is developed. Different contact force models, fracture criteria, and fracture propagations are also studied.

In summary, the authors investigate simulating rigid body fracturing, and new numerical methods and computation algorithms are designed. The new method reduces computational complexity and shortens computation time. The paper is interesting and helpful, and I recommend it to research scientists and application developers who work in similar areas.